Author: tatuakenya

Tatua Kenya works towards the eradication of poverty by strengthening the capacity of local leaders and local organizations. We work alongside the local community to build relationships, mobilize local resources and create sustainable solutions for people living in poverty in Kenya.

Tatua Fellowship is a six month program that is designed to train and coach Community Leaders and Social Activists leading social change initiatives on the practice of Community Organizing as an effective tool to harness people power for sustainable change.

The Tatua curriculum affords fellows the chance to train on Community Organizing and run actual onground campaign on their issue with coaching from a peer and experienced organizer from Tatua.

Tatua Kenya’s work is informed by the mass inequality in the lack of availability and access to basic social services among the poor and marginalized. While a lot of what we see as poverty is systemic and a result of the world’s dysfunctional unequal distribution of resources, we at Tatua see the continued negligence of leaders with authority and responsibility over public resources to fix and align such resources to serve by bridging these gaps in urban, peru-urban and rural areas

Many poor and marginalized communities have not been able to secure long term solution to the dynamic that comes with such inequalities. More often than not, such communities have left such development works to social based institutions and other external players who have stepped to support by providing for basic social .Although this trend has provided short time relief, it has not yielded any long term solution to the challenges our communities are facing. It instead has led to projects being initiated in the community that are externally motivated and lack local ownership, drive and leadership sensitive to the community’s needs, project that die immediately their sponsors are out and has rendered the communities with the feeling of incapability and dependency. We therefore believe that such communities need to raise their voice through tangible collective actions in their respective areas and demand of such mistakes to be corrected for good.

When such communities adopt the concept of grass root leadership to build strong social movements then the world begin to sense the shift on power dynamics that settles inequality at local, national and global levels. Tatua Kenya believes that the answer lies with the communities. That for real change to be realized, the capacity and agency of the challenged community has to be build and channeled purposefully. When that happens, communities regarded as poor writes a new story – all children attending school, clean and secure streets, access to basic healthcare and every home having food for their children after school. Tatua Kenya exists to expose the power of the challenged communities by organizing their strengths to create a powerful force of change. More to that, communities working with Tatua fellows benefits through platforms that unite, build meaningful relationship and inculcate agency to attain social change using their resources. Fellows who join the fellowship will lead their communities through a 6moth of campaigns that spark a beginning of dignity and hope.

The Fellowship program is a 6month course where community leaders (fellow in this case) learn, adapt and apply effective community organizing and engagement methodology. These practices have been tried and proven to work within various contexts with reasonable adaptation of the teaching. Community leaders’ sign up to the fellowship program to create a community led movement addressing a priority social issue. The materials are developed by a network of resources including Marshal Ganz of Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Greensboro School of Servant Leadership, The New Organizing Institute and Episcopal Service Corps to build structures that allow their communities to lead social change with their resources.

A brief of the fellowship’s Expected Activities.

Month

Activities

Pre-Fellowship Month

Fellows get oriented to the program, are trained on how to share their stories, do community resource mapping ,conduct a listening project in their community and start building meaningful relationships.

1st and 2nd Month

Fellows conduct community forums, do a collective decision with the community and prepare to elect a community leadership team to help lead the community movement.

3rd and 4th Month

Training for the leadership team and campaign holds a community and celebrates the first peak of the campaign.

The 5th Month

Strong leadership team implementing the strategy of the campaign, campaign achieves the 2nd peak of the campaign.

6th month

Campaign achieves the goal and community holds a celebration. Tatua and Fellows evaluate the Fellowship and set next step on engagement.

F.A.Q.’s

Who should Apply

Organizations or individuals working with the community or desiring to work with the community around social justice issues i.e Resource allocation, education, Health , environment, child protection, or food security, or public participation on governance, access to clean water lead a campaign on social justice.

Are there charges for the fellowship/ what is a Fellowship Fund.

Tatua does not charge for the fellowship and no money is required for application, however, for this program to succeed it requires collective effort of everyone involved both Tatua and the fellow alike. In that regard, there exist a fellowship fund managed by both the fellows and Tatua team and caters for the immediate training and Fellows needs. The funds for the kitty are raised collectively by both the fellows and Tatua through the guidance of a coach at Tatua.

What is a community led movement?

A community run movement is an initiative, led by local community members to create long-term change by using their own resources. The focus and tactics of those movements vary from communities and different strategies and actions to achieve change. This type of movement results in increased volunteerism, engagement and impact in the community.

What visible change will I be able to see as a result of the Fellowship program?

The Fellows develop as leaders and organizers who can work effectively with any community to run any campaign.

A committed community of people who agree to take a particular action of change.

A community movement that addresses a specific challenge with leaders who can start other movement to address social change going forward.

An indelible experience of real time leadership from on ground practice and coaching

How is Tatua Kenya committing to support fellows throughout the fellowship program?

Training the fellows on Effective Community Engagement and campaign Methodologies

Coaching the fellows regularly through their campaigns.

Guiding the fellows through the campaign process.

Offering spot training on community engagement methodology to fellows and their teams.

Measuring, evaluating and reporting the progress of the fellows to the organization.

Work together to design a training that encourages learning, adaptation and application of the methodology.

Creating a platform for the Fellows to network and build a community of support

Support in the fundraising for the Fellowship Fund

Connecting fellows to international network of community organizers

What is the expectation of the fellows in the fellowship program?

Commitment of 20hrs a week through (Fellowship is part time with a calendar that honors your other commitments)

Since our launch, over three years ago, we have been dedicated to finding sustainable solutions to the systemic causes of poverty. That commitment is at the core of our vision of social justice; that commitment is why we are community organizers.

One of the core philosophies shared by the Tatua staff and fellows is the idea that social change should not and in fact, must not, be delayed by the unavailability of monetary resources. All too often, community leaders with a vision, find their dreams stalled when they are unable to find financial backing for their projects. However, if social change is about true liberation, we need to get rid of the idea that the first step in addressing a community problem is to look for external sources of funding. This is why for our fellows, and us, the most important part of any campaign is building a firm and committed base of supporters.

However, the reality is as long as Tatua does not charge for our services, we need to continue to come up with creative ways keep our movement running. Like many community organizers before us, we have often struggled with the question of how to achieve financial sustainability without compromising our commitment to the grassroots. The process of mobilization can be slow, and our fellows need our help to get their campaigns off the ground. But if we as an organization exclusively seek grant money to support them, we are failing to model grassroots resource mobilization for our fellows.

This dilemma led us to begin to question how we understood our relationship to fundraising, and more importantly, how we engage our own support base. Thus the idea of the #PowerTheBase was born.

Crowd funding is more than just about raising money. It is about bringing together the community of people who believe that the work you are doing is important, and having them say, “Yes, I want to be part of this work.” With a crowd funding campaign, every donor becomes committed to the work and accepts to share a vision for change. With each donor, we will not only energize and facilitate the work of our fellows, but we also solidify the base of our own community. The base that will be a part of building the movement that we envision.

Therefore, today we launch the #PowerTheBase campaign. We invite you to stand with us as we energize the grassroots. We invite you to join the movement for genuine social transformation. We invite you to #PowerTheBase.